Have you been prioritizing stress-relief in your Third Age?
Stress can lead to a variety of serious health conditions, including:heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure, and depression.
If you want to live a longer, healthier life, you have to work to reduce your stress. We know that’s easier said than done, but how can we all go about that?
By moving!
Exercise is Life-Extending
In her book The Joy of Movement, Dr. Kelly McGonigal shows us exactly how we can move more to reduce our stress and anxiety.
We know (in our logical mind) that exercise can help improve our health and extend our life. Yet, it still feels like a chore to many of us! What Dr. McGonigal demonstrates in her book is that it shouldn’t be. Movement should be a source of joy!
Exercise Helps us Find Happiness
Physical activity influences many of our brain chemicals, including those that alleviate worry. It can also reduce inflammation in the brain that helps to protect against stress and anxiety.
Taking her reader through a blend of science and storytelling, McGonigal draws from neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology and combines them with memoirs, ethnographies and philosophy. Through her extensive research, she’s able to show us how movement is intertwined with the most basic of human joys. Not only that, but that it can be a powerful antidote to depression, anxiety, and loneliness.
Exercise Can be Simple
We don’t need to be doing heavy workouts, either, to see these benefits. That just taking more steps than the average (over 5,600) and moving with purpose throughout the day can help us to reduce our anxieties and stress.
So many reviewers mention how they found the book inspiring and invigorating. That when they move with purpose, they notice the same shifts.
We just need to get moving, get active, and get exercising with some intention!
If you want to explore what it means to move and be fully human, go grab this one now.
